Critics' Opinion:
Readers' rating:
Published Mar 2016
320 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
The novel that stunned—and scandalized—Europe comes to America
Winner of the Jerwood Fiction Uncovered Prize
Shortlisted for the British Fantasy Award
A Guardian Best Science Fiction Book of the Year
A Scotland Herald Best Crime Novel of the Year
Wolf, a low-rent private detective, roams London's gloomy, grimy streets, haunted by dark visions of a future that could have been—and a dangerous present populated by British Fascists and Nazis escaping Germany. Shomer, a pulp fiction writer, lies in a concentration camp, imagining another world. And when Wolf and Shomer's stories converge, we find ourselves drawn into a novel both shocking and profoundly haunting.
At once a perfectly pitched hard-boiled noir thriller (with an utterly shocking twist) and a "Holocaust novel like no other" (The Guardian), A Man Lies Dreaming is a masterful, unforgettable literary experiment from "one of our best and most adventurous writers" (Locus).
BookBrowse Review
"I found A Man Lies Dreaming very hard work. I wanted to quit reading about 30 pages in, but the book jacket talks of a 'twist' at the end, so I stuck it out. It wasn't the sex, the abuse, the hardcore subjects or the dislikable characters that turned me off. It was simply that the plot didn't work. 2 stars." - Mollie Waters
Other Reviews
"Starred Review. A wholly original Holocaust story: as outlandish as it is poignant." - Kirkus Reviews
"Brilliant... Shocking ... A twisted masterpiece ... A Holocaust novel like no other, Lavie Tidhar's A Man Lies Dreaming comes crashing through the door of literature like Sam Spade with a .38 in his hand." - The Guardian (UK)
"Readers may quickly get used to being ashamed of their laughter, but they may find it more unsettling to discover that their compassion feels equally transgressive ... Weird, upsetting, unmissable." - Daily Telegraph (UK)
"Theodor Adorno said that to write poetry after Auschwitz was barbaric. To which I would say, yes, but you can still write an excellent novel. A Man Lies Dreaming is that novel." - Philip Kerr
This information about A Man Lies Dreaming was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Lavie Tidhar is the World Fantasy Award-winning author of The Violent Century, Osama, and many other books. He won the British Fantasy Award for Best Novella and has been nominated for many other prizes. He grew up on a kibbutz in Israel and in South Africa but currently lives in London.
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